Actually I ran the OPs program on my system, and the program failed because of the wart, so it was a legitimate query.
My perl version (5.14) is more recent than the OP, so the program should run, warts and all. :-)

A Monk aims to give answers to those who have none, and to learn from those who know more.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other